Guatemala City has been the only airport where you could get Avgas in Guatemala. Recently Avgas was added to the Mundo Maya Airport (MGMM). Since Mundo Maya is also an international airport, this makes it a great option to enter Guatemala when coming from the north.

Remember there are landing fees for N-registered aircrafts of 150 GTQ and some additional fees for another 30 GTQ or so. If you land at night, they will charge for turning on the light.

Great news for Guatemala Aviation.
Make sure to show you Aeroclub Guatemala membership to get a discounted rate.

The Aviation Weather is a great resource for pilots. This website is run by the US government but provides valuable weather information for pilots globally. Some other parts of this webpage leverage the Aviation Weather webpage heavily.

Guatemala has some unique features to offer for pilots. Hot and humid coastal areas, high altitude airports, mountainous terrains, windy canyons, multi-language ATC, powerful cloud buildups and yes, active volcanos. So watch out for VA in your METAR (see more locally common METAR codes).

In preparation of a recent flight I found a bullet in my hangar.

It was lying close to the open hangar door, so my first thought that it came in through below the door. Obviously I checked the aircraft extensively including the surfaces of the wings from above with a ladder, no impact was found anywhere, not even a scratch. A friend and I were searching for possible hangar entry points and found a small hole right above the aircraft. We also found a scratch in the floor suggesting roughly a 60° entry and could explain why the bullet would have ended towards the wall, under the door. We searched the entire hangar and this is the most plausible explanation so far.

If true, the bullet came through the hangar roof only slightly slowed down. It could have caused significant damage to the airplane. Damage on top of the aircraft can be hard to identify. How often do you climb on the ladder and have a good look from above?

I will include some checking of the hangar roof and the floor for objects into my checklist.

The weather in Guatemala is absolutely great all year around. Especially in the mornings, you can almost always find some time to fly. Later in the year, mornings a great and then bad weather starts to build up in the afternoon. Between November and February, it seems like the weather is made for flying all day long. Only cold fronts bring strong winds, sometimes too strong to comfortably fly. The Aeroclub organizes Full Moon Fly-Ins called “lunadas” for instrument rated pilots between November and February. Participants leave Guatemala City to arrive in Iztapa before dark, then fly back later after sunset. Flying at night in Guatemala requires a instrument rating. Its absolutely worth it, great views assured and good practice for instrument flying as well. Check out some pictures below.

Surely this has happened to you. You were very eager to fly, and when you taxi out a loooooong line of planes to get out of La Aurora fighting with the commercial airplanes getting in. This gets much worse when morning fog closes the airport. Then you can almost certainly expect long waiting times.

Its hard to predict human behavior like pilots like you and me. Surely Guatemala weather is usually more favorable in the mornings. But I did look at some hard data of commercial airlines. These are scheduled and I pulled the data for free from http://www.flightstats.com. A little bit of data manipulation and here it goes…

The left-hand side of the graph shows average arrival and departure times. Also the overall activity which is simply the sum of the two. Same information but this time for the week-end is on the right side.

For the early morning guys, based on this you need to get out before or at 6:00 in the morning. The first peak of mostly departures happens between 06:00 and 07:00. Throughout the week this stays more or less high until about noon then drops down a little. So afternoon flying throughout the week looks promising. There is a little peak about 7:00 but then the day winds down.

On week-ends, you can get out very early or wait since between 7:00 and 9:00 scheduled activity drops again. In turn you have the peak around lunch with both incoming and outgoing commercial aircrafts.

Ok. I will admit it, not the huge discovery, but interesting nonetheless.